Late One Night When the Wind Was Still
by AManAdrift
Summary: OK, it's the dreaded songfic, kind of. I have Strong Feelings about the song "Halley Came to Jackson" by Mary Chapin Carpenter. One of them is that it makes me think of my Shep and his baby daughter Nezzy. Throw in a strictly periodic build-up of volatile gases in the Widow Nebula, and we've got ourselves a tribute. Pure plotless fluff, and I regret nothing!


At the age of 74, Phil Shepard still hit the gym three times a week — all Liara had had to do was wrap her fingers part-way around one of his forearms, smile and say 'Mmm,' and suddenly he'd found he had all the motivation he needed — he'd held situational command of fleets and armies, determined the fate of worlds, and stood very personally over a nuclear weapon with nothing but his engineering degree between him and his friends and a _really_ big bang. Perhaps most relevantly, his eldest was now four years old. Still, he took a deep breath, let it out slowly and listened to his heartbeat slowing down before he tried to pick up the baby. She turned her head on one side, but finding the movement arrested by a rock-steady arm, did not see fit to wake up. he stood up and moved smoothly to the window.

 _Will I ever get used to this?_ He wondered. _…and_ should _I_? The window was floor-to-ceiling, which really emphasised the fact that the apartment… that _this floor_ of the apartment used up two full decks of the Citadel Presidium. If it were on the open market, it would probably have wiped out the T'Soni family money and his own more modest net worth altogether — not that they'd ever have dreamed of buying a home so ostentatious. But the public had pressed it on him when he joined the Council, and in the end he'd had to acquiesce. Even empty, without the furniture they'd picked out, the very architecture of the place screamed that someone important lived here; always had and always would. Phil pictured a party of Prothean petitioners banging their foreheads on the floor in honour of some Grand Panjandrum of a previous tenant. _Note to self: be more representative than that, at a bare minimum…_

He looked up at Kithoi and Zakera wards — Tayseri ward was at his feet, looking almost like any planetary city, so for a real Citadel Mind-Bending Experience, Councillor Shepard recommends looking up at the two cities hung upside down eight miles above your head! For a farm-boy whose world up to the age of sixteen had consisted practically of the same five hundred people, the fact that each of those tiny winking lights represented a separate spark of sentient life going about its business was especially overwhelming. _Of course, tonight of all nights they'll be mostly on the other side of the buildings, with the lights_ off.

"…so when the concentration of heavier elements — like sodium, or bromine gas — gets high enough, there's a chain reaction that causes the whole show. If there are no comets, and if we don't throw out too much of the wrong kind of garbage, it's perfectly regular, with a period of four hundred forty-seven standard years, plus a few days."

"Huh." Their eldest absorbed Liara's scholarly — and professionally delivered — lecture for a moment. "So the nebula's got gas?"

Liara laughed aloud, and Phil closed his eyes: if he let himself shiver the way he wanted to at the sound of that beautiful music, he'd probably wake the baby.

"Oh, Terri, look: it's starting!" Phil's eyes flew open as Liara and Terri came to stand next to him in the window and this time he did shiver. Gasped, to boot:

It began with streaks of lightning — or what looked like lightning — turning lines of shadow in the nebular matter into searing instants of coloured light, each a subtly different shade, suggesting — yes, various copper compounds as well as the sodium Liara had mentioned, if he was remembering both their chemistry classes right. _Baby Nezzy,_ he thought, _I'm afraid both your parents are incorrigible nerds._

In between the fault-lines that had so briefly burned, the nebula seemed to boil and churn itself up in long thing rolls; when two of these pulled themselves apart from one another, the thin layer between would resolve itself into tendrils of glowing plasma, running between the revolving cloudlets for a second or two, before seeming to decide on one of them, whereupon the plasma filament's light would run up or down and briefly light the whole cloudlet up in shades of green and blue.

As the volatiles exhausted themselves, the 'lightning' flashes and the glow of the plasma tendrils abated in a smooth diminuendo, and between the cloudlets the nebular gases in general grew so thin that stars began to reveal themselves as if they'd come to watch the show.

"There:" Shepard was instantly entranced by the single word, addressed impartially to both him and Teri. His eyes drank in Liara's profile as hers tried to focus across the light years, and her quiet alto poured into his ears like honey; "Sol," she pointed at one winking light, her eyes saccaded purposefully for a beat, and she pointed agian: "and Parnitha." Phil gladly let himself be dazzled indirectly as Liara turned to smile down at their daughter: "Your homeworlds have come to see you, Terri."

Out of the stupid-making fog of being surrounded by such beauty, Phil recovered enough presence of mind to let what Liara had said actually sink in. "Wait, really?"

Liara giggled: "You haven't seen the news in days, have you?" He shook his head sheepishly. "They've been running stories on it every day for a week," she told him. "'The home stars of two Council races will be visible from the Citadel for the first time in recorded history.'"

Phil acknowledged his obliviousness with a grin, and looked down at the baby: having a newborn to look after was his excuse for not being up on the _Ascension_ with the other V.I.P.s, enjoying a ringside seat for the light-show at the price of having to work the room and produce platitudes on demand. Instead he was enjoying the moment in the place he wanted to be above all others: with his family.

As if in response to the gush of gratitude that her daddy was feeling, baby Benezia opened her eyes and looked up at him, and Phil grinned some more. _Now_ that's _the most beautiful thing I've seen tonight._ Liara was kind enough to pretend that Nezzy had her father's eyes, but Phil knew the truth: she took entirely after her mother, and was therefore perfect, and he'd fight anyone who said different.

No sooner had they opened than baby Nezzy's big blue eyes started to shut again. A natural association of ideas led a fist of ice to close itself around his heart just as she drifted back to sleep: the idea that she might have to endure some of the shit that he'd been through, that the first sixteen years of _her_ life might suddenly have to be paid for with as many years of fear and pain and chaos and loss before she'd even start to feel like she knew what she was doing, well, it was just unacceptable, that was all. _Live,_ he bade her silently. _Live long, and safe and happy and at peace. See the Widow Nebula boil and burn… three times at least! Become the first person people think of when anyone says 'Matriarch Benezia'._ He pressed his eyes tight shut and willed it as hard as his agnostic self knew how.

A soft sound brought him back to the here and now: he opened his eyes and looked down and to the left, to see Terri's pink eyes looking solemnly — they always seemed to look solemnly — up at him. Her left hand already held Liara's right, so he grinned, shifted Nezzy securely into the crook of his right arm, and took Terri's other hand. The T'Soni Shepards — those of them that were awake, anyway — watched the rest of the Sæcular Fires together. Solemnly.


End file.
